


Cloak and Dagger

by mk_tortie



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Dark, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-04-27
Updated: 2011-04-27
Packaged: 2017-10-18 17:33:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/191446
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mk_tortie/pseuds/mk_tortie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>One dagger, dipped in one glass of wine, shared on one day in each year. Her birthday.</i></p><p>The war is over, and there is little left of the wizarding world. When a shocking danger threatens what remains, can Ginny gather together the last of her friends to defeat an ancient evil?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cloak and Dagger

**Author's Note:**

> This is a WIP, but updates will be extremely sporadic. As such, this chapter can also be considered as a one-shot.

One dagger, dipped in one glass of wine, shared on one day in each year. Her birthday.

It was the third time around, now, of this strange tradition. Last time, it was she who had sent out the tentative invitation, to repeat the toast they had made the previous year. And this year, he had requested that she join him. So here she found herself, picking a way across the Heath in the half-light. Broken glass and twisted metal were mixed among the long grass; the trees themselves mimicked this, misshapen and gnarled into eldritch caricatures. There was not really much to be scared of here, she knew - but there was always the chance of inferi, always the chance of dementors, and always the chance of vigilantes. If they caught her, they would steal her wand, that was for certain. Wands were scarce, these days, shared amongst groups or secreted away in cupboards, to be used furtively and discretely. It was for this reason that Ginny did not cast  _lumos_. She wasn't stupid.

Instead, she walked with her wand strapped to her side, deep inside her robes. She had no fear of being spotted by Muggles, not nowadays. They knew to keep well away from places such as this, and stick to their tin box cars and their tidy little houses. A few years of "disappearances" meant that the place had gained a reputation. Well, it was the same with most of London's parks, she knew. She supposed that in more isolated places there was less to fear - the remnants of the Dark Lord's army of monsters preferred cities to the country. There was more food.  _Better the Muggles than me,_  Ginny thought, and hated herself for it. But it was true. There were just so few wizarding folk left. They had to protect their numbers, or they would die out, like the dodo. She couldn't help but grin at the thought of that - a stuffed wizard in a glass case in the Natural History Museum, next to a model of that funny shaped bird: "Major extinctions of the modern period".

Fred and George would find that funny.... No. No, they wouldn't. Fred and George didn't find  _anything_  funny anymore. She pushed those thoughts back down into the depths of her awareness, and concentrated instead on her immediate surroundings. There were lights in the distance now. She was approaching the town. 

The devastation that the wizarding war had caused had affected Muggle Britain too; buildings had been reduced to rubble, and acres of woodland had burnt to dust. Through the eyes of the people, Voldemort's attacks became sudden disappearances and random, unexplained mass murders. The national spirit had turned from the 'let's all get on with it' attitude of the Muggle World Wars to an atmosphere of nervousness and hiding. A financial depression had quickly followed the war, both in the Muggle and Magical spheres, although it was less obvious in this affluent area than in many other parts of London. Ginny trudged up the darkened street. Candles flickered in a few windows; the slump, combined with dwindling oil stocks and political wars raging in large parts of the Middle East, had rendered electricity a precious and costly commodity, to only be used when absolutely necessary. Street lights were out of the question.

Only the church was obvious, high on the hill. Faced with such a spate of unexplained events, many people had turned to religion for answers. Ginny eyed it, half amused, half wistful. If only the wizarding world had the comfort of such ignorance when it came to the war. She had taken Muggle Studies at Hogwarts, but she had never been able to make up her mind as to the existence of the Muggle deities. She knew that Voldemort's attacks were no signs of Apocalypse though.  _Well, not in the way **they**  think, anyway,_ she mused grimly. 

The pebbles crunched underneath her feet as she paced down the private road where he lived. It was so typical of him to live here amongst the Muggle celebrities and "new money".  _Actually, more typical of his mother,_  Ginny reasoned. True, his manner was smooth and polished, and he behaved as if he belonged here, but he had never been as snooty as Malfoy. Actually, she barely remembered him from Hogwarts, even after he had turned up at their DA meeting during her Sixth year and casually announced that, since he was on their side, wasn't it about time they utilised his skills? So self-confident. So  _arrogant_ , back then. They all were.

She sighed, stepping onto the marble doorstep and pulling the old-fashioned handle that rang the doorbell. A long chime sounded deep in the depths of the crumbling mansion. She had only been here once, when they first found the dagger and unintentionally began this weird ritual. The house had definitely deteriorated since then. Of course, he only cared about books, these days.

~

There she was, hooded and cloaked as she always was. He watched her stride purposefully up the gravelled drive, waiting for her to ring the bell before he even started to move. Let her wait on the doorstep - he was in no hurry, so why should she be? She rang the doorbell, and he watched her pull back her hood. They were barely visible anymore, really, the scars the war had left on her.  _Vain little chit, to keep on hiding her face like that_ , he thought. He found it rather endearing.

Pulling his cane towards him, he stumped away from his window and down the grand staircase. The door squealed a complaint as he pulled it open.

"Miss Weasley"

She held his gaze coolly. "I can see you've been quite the socialite", she said, gesturing at the complaining door.

"Now, Miss Weasley, sarcasm is simply not becoming in a lady", he returned, but she could tell he was trying not to smile. As hard as he tried to make out, she knew he had to be lonely sometimes.

"Whoever told you I was a lady, Mr Zabini?" she quipped, stepping through the doorway into the dusty hall. 

No one had come out of the war unscathed. Most hadn't come out at all. She and Zabini were the luckiest, Ginny knew. They could still move, they could still think, they could still talk. Of the others still alive of their generation, several were insane, one was legless, and one was blind. Not that that mattered, in Luna's case - she would never let a small thing like that get her down. But that was it. Five still alive, out of however many. And the rest all gone. 

Blaise regarded her, snakelike, unblinkingly, like the Slytherin he was. "Life is too short for brooding, Ginny", he said quietly. "Shall we?"

He gestured towards the stairs, which, like the hallway and doors, were covered with a thick layer of dust and cobwebs. She followed him, slowly, up and into the only room of the house which looked as though it was even slightly cared about. 

"You remember my library?" Blaise asked, as if he was introducing a friend. Ginny glanced around. The walls were hidden by ceiling to floor shelves of books upon books upon books. Two moth-eaten leather chairs sat in the middle of the wooden floor. In between them was a table, on which was placed a single silver chalice.

"Yes", she replied. "How could I forget?"

~

 _They were the only ones left. Out of the hundreds of Hogwarts students who had joined the resistance after Dumbledore's death, they were the only ones left, in this big old house on the hill in Hampstead. It was August the 11th, Ginny's seventeenth birthday, and Hogwarts had fallen. The day she was finally old enough to join the Order, there was barely an Order left. Just Remus and Tonks. And the house that Blaise had provided, for those students who had banded together to fight but were underage, that house was now empty. She went through the disasters in her head. February: Hogwarts closed on Ministry orders, and the gathering of perhaps a hundred students in her year and below, in this house, most against their parent's wishes. March: attacks on the Ministry, carrying on throughout the spring and summer, until its fall, just over a month previously. And two months ago, the fall of St Mungo's. They numbered fifty after that. Until today._  The Creeveys are dead,  _Ginny thought despairingly._  Luna is probably dead by now. And Ron....  _Helplessly, she began to cry, tears falling down her cheeks and into her lap._

 _Suddenly, a hand rested on her shaking shoulders._

 _"Weasley." Blaise appeared in front of her, taking her hands in his._  "Ginny!"  _She looked up at him through stinging eyes._

 _"We can't give up now. We can't leave yet. What use is their dying, if we don't carry on?"_

 _"But **how**  can we carry on?" she gasped. "What use is their dying? What use is anything at all?  **We can't win, Blaise!**  There's nothing we can do. How many people are there left on our side? Ten? How can we win? Everyone we love will die, Blaise. We'll die. For a useless, pointless cause. We are all going to die." She closed her eyes in despair._

 _He pulled her to her feet, and, to her surprise, hugged her hard. "Ginny. Look at me. We can't think like that. There's still Harry, isn't there?"_

 _She looked up into his face, and was amazed to see his eyes suddenly light up and a small smile part his lips. "What? What could there possibly be to smile about?"_

 _"I have an idea..." he replied quietly. She started as he pulled his knife from his belt. He looked at her. "Just... wait here. One moment, please."_

 _Frozen, she watched startled as he went to the decanter and poured a full glass of wine, setting it on the table in the middle of the library where they stood. "I...my mother." he began, and then stopped._

 _She frowned through her tears, confused. "Your mother what?"_

 _"She was very widely read."_

 _"What?!"_

 _"So am I. And she told me about this, and I researched it. Yesterday, when I couldn't sleep, I was thinking about it... and maybe it could help now. I suppose you could call it a ritual. You never did runes, did you?"_

 _"No", Ginny replied._

 _He smiled again. "So just keep quiet and concentrate then. You won't be able to read it. Just grip the dagger."_

 _He pulled a scrap of parchment from his pocket and began to chant softly, holding out the dagger so that it hung over the full cup between them. Ginny reached out a shaking hand and clasped the hilt above his larger fist. Suddenly, he plunged it downwards into the cup, and his chanting reached a louder, higher pitch. Then abruptly, it was over. He uncurled her fingers from the handle and placed the knife on the table._

 _"Drink some wine", he directed._

 _She lifted the cup and sipped, then passed it to him._

 _"The dagger represents power", he explained, taking a sip. "The wine is like a pool of blood. Look!" He gestured to the droplets which now lay on the surface of the table, spilled when the knife hit the liquid. "We held the dagger, and spilt the blood."_

 _He took her by the shoulders. "We're going to win tomorrow", he said confidently._

 _Ginny gazed at him in horror. "That was dark magic, Blaise. I've just lost my brother, and you make me do Dark Arts. Whose side are you on, anyway?'_

 _Backing away from him, she pulled out of his grip, and ran from the room._

~

They gripped the dagger between them. Ginny's skin stretched white across her knuckles. The splash of wine as the knife hit the liquid flecked their hands with red droplets. Blaise's eyes were closed as he chanted.

~

 _A year ago today, Hogwarts had fallen, and Ginny wished she couldn't remember it. Nothing was as it was, and it could never be again. She lived in small circles; work-home-sleep; see Fred and George, see Charlie, see Luna; worry-wish-cry. It stretched out before her in an endless cycle, of pretending to be something she wasn't in the Muggle world because there was no magical one left to live in, of missing and fearing and hating herself for surviving. And she didn't know quite why, because she was sure she would never speak to him again, but today she was writing a letter and sending it because somewhere deep down inside, she thought that maybe, just maybe, Blaise's ritual could change things back to how they were. Even if it was Dark Arts. Because despite it looking hopeless, they had _won_ against Voldemort's huge army - and if it had caused that, then who knew what else it could do?_

When the owl came back with her parchment, she thought he had refused, and was shocked by the sinking feeling in her stomach. And what explained the swelling feeling in her chest when she noticed the single word, 'alright', scratched in neat cursive across the bottom?

The day after her birthday thedayaftertheritual _Hedwig turned up._

~

She didn't know what Blaise was thinking, this year. Well, she never knew - he was a closed book, just like all the others mouldering in his library. But it was more obvious, somehow, that this year he was thinking  _something_ , and she didn't know what it was. But then, she didn't think he knew what she was silently hoping, either. Because this year, maybe Harry would turn up. Because if Hedwig had come, then Harry would follow. That was how it had been, every summer. Now it would be the same. And if Harry came, then everything would change. Everything would be better. Because he was 'The Chosen One'. wasn't he? 'The Boy Who Lived'? 'The Champion of the Wizarding World'? And Voldemort had died twice, so Harry would survive twice. Three years ago there was no body, and Voldemort's body was gone too, but that was because it had exploded and killed everyone, hadn't it? But Harry could survive that, because Harry survived everything. So he would be back.

'Ginny, it's finished!'

Blaise's words made her open her tightly shut eyes. There was a tone to his voice that she couldn't place, an emotion she had never heard there before.

'Well... then..' She looked at him, and wondered how he still managed to smile. 'I'll be off, then.'

He watched as she walked from the room, hearing her footsteps on the stairs and the swish of her cloak through the door. Then silence, and he was alone again.

'This year will be the year', he said softly. 'Three times the dagger, and now for the blood.'

Not caring to wipe the blade, he pricked his thumb with the tip of the knife, and watched a droplet of blood drip into the cup of wine. He could see it sinking, until it touched the bottom. The liquid clouded, and Blaise smiled.

The front door squealed.


End file.
